

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 






















MONEY 


COMPILED BY WORKERS OF THE 
WRITERS’ PROGRAM OF THE WORK 
PROJECTS ADMINISTRATION IN THE 
COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA 


—.JUNIOR PRESS BOOKS - 

ALBERT^HITMAN 

&" 4co 

CHICAGO 1940 











rt-wn 

PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION 
State-wide Sponsor of the 
Pennsylvania Writers' Project 

FEDERAL WORKS AGENCY 
John M. Carmody, Administrator 

WORK PROJECTS ADMINISTRATION 

F. C. Harrington, Commissioner 
Florence Kerr, Assistant Commissioner 
Philip Mathews, State Administrator 


RECEIVED 

OCT -5 1940 

COPYRIGHT OFFICE 
COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 


Co-sponsored and copyrighted, 1940, by Division of Extension Education 
Board of Public Education, Philadelphia 


FOREWORD 


Money is the eleventh of thirty booklets in the 
Children's Science Series. It was prepared by 
the Philadelphia Unit of the Pennsylvania 
Writers' Project, sponsored by the Pennsyl¬ 
vania Department of Public Instruction. 

This booklet, written by Mark Bartman, was 
edited by Katharine Britton of the State office 
staff. 

Acknowledgment is made to Dr. Gordon 
Keith, Wharton School, University of Pennsyl¬ 
vania, and Edwin H. Dressel, Superintendent of 
the Philadelphia Mint, for acting as consultants 
to assure accuracy of the text. 

Color work and the majority of black-and- 
white illustrations were prepared by Charles 
Rossner of the Pennsylvania Art Project, under 
the direction of Michael Gallegher. The full 
page of contemporary coins and some of the 
black-and-white drawings are the work respec¬ 
tively of Vernon Rhodes and Russell Worman 
of the Pennsylvania Writers' Project. 

C. C. Lesley 
State Supervisor 



SILVER - CROWN 1936 



RUSSIA 

SILVER-i RUBLE 1924 



CANADA 

SILVER-ONE DOLLAR 
1936 



ITALY 

SILVER - 3 LIRE 1911 



SILVER - 5 MARKS igo7 



GOLD - 200 MARKKAA 1926 



ICELAND 

SILVER -10 KRONER 1930 



UNITED STATES 
GOLD - DOUBLE EAGLE 1910 



CHINESE REPUBLIC 
SILVER - DOLLAR 1912 



FRANCE 

BRONZE 10 CENTIMES 
1921 



ROUMANIA 
SILVER - 5 LEI 
19 01 



AUSTRALIA 
SILVER -1 CROWN 1937 


COINS OF TODAY FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD 




MONEY 


Everyone knows what money looks 
like, and what it is used for. A penny 
buys a lollypop. A nickel buys an ice¬ 
cream cone. A dime buys a baseball. 

Most of the time people don’t think 
about money any more than they do 
about the air they breathe. But sup¬ 
pose all those jingling coins and crack¬ 
ling paper bills were taken away from 
them, and the world was left without 
any money at all? 

And now suppose there’s a farmer who 
wants some new clothes. He climbs 
into his car and drives off to town. He 
goes into a store and asks to see a pair of 


6 


CHILDREN'S SCIENCE SERIES 


shoes. The shoe man looks at him and 
asks, "What will you give for them?” 

The farmer opens a big bag. The clerk 
looks inside. Two plump chickens! 

The shoe man shakes his head. "I 
don’t want chickens. But I could use 
some salt.” 

"Just have chickens. I have no salt,” 
the farmer says sadly. 

"Sorry,” says the shoe man, turning 
away. "You’ll have to try some other 
place.” 

So the farmer has to try here and he 
has to try there. Maybe he is lucky. 
Maybe there is some shop that will take 
chickens for shoes. If there is none, he 
has to keep the chickens himself and go 
without shoes. 

But the farmer is no worse off than 
people in the city. For instance, there’s 
a man who works in a shovel factory. 
His wages are paid in shovels, and he 
has to carry his pay check home in a 
truck! Besides, he has a dreadful time 
finding people who will take shovels in 


MONEY 


7 


exchange for eggs and milk, socks and 
ties. 

How clumsy it would be to do business 
in such a world! How much easier it 
is to buy things with money and be paid 
with money! 



ROMAN COIN WITH PICTURE OF BULL 


And yet, people have not always had 
what is now known as money. With¬ 
out money they couldn’t buy or sell 
things. So they traded. Trading 
meant giving one kind of goods in ex¬ 
change for another. It was shoes for 
chickens, or dishes for a horse. But 


8 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

often a man had a hard time to make a 
good trade. A farmer with corn to trade 
sometimes couldn’t find a man who 
needed corn. And if he did, this man 
might not have anything that the farmer 
would take in exchange. 

USEFUL THINGS AS MONEY 

Then, here and there, people began to 
find better ways of trading goods. In 
every place there were some things that 
were worth much more than others. 
These things had value because of their 
beauty or their usefulness, or both. If 
they were scarce, their value was greater, 
because they were hard to get. So 
every one desired them. They were easy 
to exchange for other goods, and they 
came to be used much as money is used 
today. Such things are called money 
materials. 

In early Greece and Italy, for instance, 
one money material was cattle. A man 
who owned cattle could make use of 
them in many ways. He could eat their 


MONEY 



THE INDIANS STRUNG THEIR WAMPUM ON BELTS. 


meat. He could drink their milk. He 
could make clothing from their skins 
and hair, or tools from their bones and 
horns. And cattle could pull heavy 
loads. They could help in farming. 

So everyone wanted to own some cattle. 
A farmer might not want to take wood 
in exchange for wheat. But he would 
never refuse cows or oxen. After a while, 
cattle came to be used very often in 
trading. A certain number of oxen 
would buy a certain amount of land, or 
a certain number of dishes or tools, or 
pots or jewels. They would even buy a 
wife! 

After a time the people of Greece and 
Italy began to use metal as money. But 




10 CHILDREN'S SCIENCE SERIES 

they still remembered their cattle money, 
and put pictures of bulls or cows on their 
coins. 

The Egyptians first used animals for 
money, long before the Greeks and Ro¬ 
mans. They bought and sold with sheep. 
Even when they began to use gold in¬ 
stead, they shaped the gold into the 
form of small sheep. This showed that 
the gold could be traded just as live 
sheep had been in the past. 

These men of long ago depended for 
their living mostly on farming and meat 
raising. That was why cattle and sheep 
were so important that they could be 
exchanged easily for other goods. For 
the same reason, tools for farming were 
prized by the people of early China, 
and were used there for money. 

But the people of early times were not 
the only ones whose money materials 
were useful things. Whenever men 
have to work hard just to live, they 
value most the things for which they have 
the greatest need. 


MONEY 


11 


When the first settlers came to Amer¬ 
ica, their whole way of living was 
changed from what it had been in Eu¬ 
rope. So their money materials were 
changed too. They no longer used metal 
coins so much. They even paid taxes 
to their government in cattle and vege¬ 
tables. One trouble with that plan was 
that people tried to give the government 
old or sickly cattle and keep the best 
ones for themselves. 

The government lost in another way 
too. Sometimes the tax offices got so 
full of vegetables and live animals that 
there was a big sale. Everything had 
to be sold, often very cheaply, and the 
government lost money. 

In Virginia, where much tobacco was 
grown, the taxes were paid with to¬ 
bacco. Even ministers were paid with 
tobacco. 

Another kind of money the settlers * 
had was nails. Nails were worth a great 
deal because they were made by hand 
and shipped from Europe. Besides, they 


12 CHILDREN'S SCIENCE SERIES 

were useful in building homes and many 
articles made of wood. The man who 
owned a keg of nails was wealthy, even 
if he had little else. 

One thing that has been used as money 
by a great many people at different times 
is salt. Salt is so easy to get in America 
that no one thinks much about it here. 
But it is very important, for no one can 
live long without it. So in those places 
where salt is hard to get, its worth is 
great. 

In some parts of Africa, for instance, 
blocks of salt are money even today. 
When a man goes to market there, he 
loads up his camel or donkey with salt 
blocks. But he’s very likely to lose some 
of his money on the way. To be polite 
he must let any friend he meets lick the 
salt a bit. If he meets too many friends 
and is too polite, he may reach the mar¬ 
ket with no salt at all. 

Hatchets, furs, skins, rice, tea, dates 
— each has been money at some time in 
some place. And every one of them was 


MONEY 


13 


valued first because it had some real 
use in the daily life of the people. They 
were worth a great deal because they 
helped to give men food or clothing or 
provided shelter. 



EARLY SETTLERS IN AMERICA USED HAND-MADE NAILS AS 
MONEY. 

PRETTY THINGS AS MONEY 

It is not always the most useful things, 
however, that are valued most and 
become money materials. When the 
people in some places have enough of 
the things they need, then they want 
pretty things, and value those more. 
In very warm countries, for instance, 
where fruit and nuts and other foods 
grow without much help from men, where 
only the lightest clothes are worn, men 
do not have to think much about their 
needs. Nature takes care of them. So 


14 CHILDREN'S SCIENCE SERIES 

they desire most the things that are 
hard to get — beautiful little trinkets, 
things that shine and sparkle, orna¬ 
ments, or materials from which orna¬ 
ments can be made. 

Bright feather money is used by the 
young men of one South Sea island when 
they go to buy their wives. And with 
what trouble these feathers have been 
gathered! The young man first covers 
a shell with sticky sap from a tree. 
Then he carries this into the woods. 
Sitting very quietly, he repeats the love 
call of the little red bird that he wants 
to trap. After a while the little bird 
answers. He lures it closer and closer, 
until at last it rests helplessly on the 
sticky shell. Then he robs it of its bright 
feathers, and carries them off to add to 
the others that will someday buy him 
a wife. 

Surely this is a strange way to earn 
money. But it is no stranger than the 
ways of many of the islands and coun¬ 
tries of the South Pacific Ocean. In 


MONEY 


15 


one place the natives catch woodpeckers, 
and use the red-feathered skin from the 
head for money. In others, they buy 
and sell with red and white whale’s 
teeth, and porpoise teeth, and even tusks 
of wild pigs. 



SALT IS MONEY IN SOME PLACES IN AFRICA. 

But shells have been used as money 
more often than any of these things. 
To people living close to water, nothing 
could seem more lovely, more desirable, 
than these tiny shell homes of strange 
sea creatures, with their soft colors and 
their curious curves. The natives of one 
island use the shells of a certain kind of 
snail in trading. They prize this snail 
shell money so highly that they some¬ 
times kill their slaves and use the slaves’ 



16 CHILDREN'S SCIENCE SERIES 


flesh for bait to catch the snails. That 
is one of the evil things that men do to 
gain money. 

Years ago, the Indians in our country 
used shells for money too. They made 
the shells into black and white beads 
called wampum, and strung them on a 
wampum belt in many designs. When 
settlers came from Europe to America, 
they used the wampum to trade with 
Indians, and even to buy and sell among 
themselves. It took four to eight white 
wampum beads to equal a penny, and 
half as many of the black ones. 

Some of these money materials may 
not seem very pretty to us. But the 
people who use them like them, and 
wear them as ornaments. In their 
minds, that is what money is for. This 
was true also of the early American In¬ 
dians. They did not use metal money 
to exchange goods. But when some 
settlers pushed out to the Pacific Coast, 
they found the Indians there using white 
man’s coins for something else. The 


MONEY 


17 


men were decorating their squaws and 
their sweethearts with strings of dimes 
and nickels. 



PEOPLE OF THE ISLAND OF NEW GUINEA HAD SHARK’S-TOOTH 
MONEY. 

METAL MONEY 

So far, none of these things has been 
what we people now think of as real 
money. They are like the buttons used 
in playing storekeeper, or the pins paid 
to see a play show in the barn or the back 
yard. 

Only certain things seem like real 
money to us. That is because they have 
been used for a long time as money by 
people in the most important countries 
of the world. Among all the money ma¬ 
terials used by different people at differ- 


18 


CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 


ent times, certain ones seemed to make 
better money. So they came to be used 
more and more. They were metals — 
gold and silver, and even copper, brass, 
bronze, and iron. 

A good money material has to have 
several qualities. First, it has to be 
something that every one knows by sight, 
so people cannot give false money instead 
of real money. Today no one could fool 
us with a quarter made of iron, or a 
dime made of lead. 

And the material has to be able to 
last a long time. That was one trouble 
with cattle as money. A man might 
trade some land for a cow, and the cow 
might get sick and die before he could 
make use of it. Then he would have 
only a dead cow in exchange for his land. 
But the money metals will last for hun¬ 
dreds and hundreds of years. 

There must not be too much of the 
money material in the world, for if a 
thing is too easy to get, its value is less. 
If it is scarce, a small amount is worth 


MONEY 


19 



MEN OF FRANCE LONG AGO USED RINGS AND BRACELETS 
AS MONEY. 


more. Then a small amount can be 
easily carried, yet it will buy a much 
larger amount of goods. A man could 
never carry enough corn to buy a house. 
But enough gold would not be heavy at 
all. 

And while these money metals were 































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22 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

scarce enough to have value, there was 
enough of them in the world to supply as 
much money as people needed for trading. 

At first metal money was in the shape 
of lumps or bars or dust, or sometimes 
ornaments. It had to be weighed or 
measured each time it was used in buy¬ 
ing or selling. So many lumps of gold 
were paid for so many cattle. But this 
was not very convenient. A simpler way 
of measuring was needed. 

COINS 

The answer was to make the metal 
into coins. A coin is a small piece of 
metal, shaped and marked in a certain 
way so that everyone can tell what it is 
and just how much it is worth. It has 
to be put out either by a government or 
by someone to whom the government 
gives the right to make coins. That is 
why one side of a coin very often bears 
the head of the king or the president of 
the country in which the coin is made. 


MONEY 


23 



IN ALASKA FISH HOOKS WERE SO IMPORTANT THAT THEY 
WERE OFTEN USED AS MONEY. 

Probably the first people to make coins 
were the Lydians, who lived in a part of 
the land that is now Turkey. They made 
their coins of electrum, which is a mix¬ 
ture of gold and silver. That was more 
than 2,600 years ago. Coins were so 
much better than the old way of measur¬ 
ing money that before long people were 
making them in other countries too. 

The Romans, as we already know, 
marked their early coins with the pic¬ 
ture of the money materials they had 
used in the past. Other people did the 
same thing. So it is easy to guess what 
things were most valued in each place. 
Some of these things seem as strange as 
the money of the South Sea islands. 




24 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

The people of Aegina, a little island 
near Greece, put the picture of a sea 
turtle on their coins. Some coins of 
Boeotia, a part of Greece, had the picture 
of a shield made of the skin of an ox. The 
coins of Athens bore a sprig of olive, for 
the olive tree was important then, just 
as it is in Greece today. On the Isle of 
Naxos, near Greece, the coins had the 
picture of a wine cup. For Naxos was a 
land rich in grapes and famous even 
then for its wine. 

From early times, most coins have been 
round. But when the Chinese first made 
coins, they shaped some like knives and 
others like dresses, or human bodies. 
The dress money was to be used to buy 
clothes. On one end of these strange 
coins the Chinese placed a round piece 
with a hole in the middle, so the coins 
could be carried on a string. After a 
while they saw that the coins were 
clumsy, so they made the knife or dress 
part smaller and smaller, until at last 
nothing was left of the coins but the 


MONEY 


25 



THESE LYDIAN COINS WERE MADE MORE THAN 2600 YEARS 
AGO. 


round piece with the hole in the middle. 
And that was how the Chinese cash, as 
the coin is called, came into use. 

There’s another story about the cash, 
too. About 1,300 years ago the Chinese 
wanted to change the cash a little, so 
they made a wax model of the new 
design to show to the Empress. The 
wax was still a little soft when the Em¬ 
press touched it, and so her nail made a 
little mark, like a slim moon crescent. 
The Chinese honored their ruler, and 
so they left the mark there. To this 
day it can still be seen on Chinese coins. 





26 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 
MONEY THIEVES 

Coins had not been in use long before 
dishonest people saw that they could 
get rich quickly by making false, or 
counterfeit coins. These looked like the 
real ones. Lead, for instance, cost much 
less than silver. A man could get a lot 
of lead for a small sum, and make a 
great many counterfeit silver coins from 
it. Then he could use the counterfeit 
coins like real ones, and get a great deal 
of real money or goods. 

Some thieves did not bother to make 
counterfeit coins. They just drilled out 
the inside of real coins, filled the empty 
spaces with lead, and covered the lead 
with good metal again. Each coin then 
looked just as it had before, and it was 
used as a real coin. So the thief’s pile 
of stolen gold or silver dust grew and 
grew, until he was caught and thrown 
into jail. 

Some men stole by scraping off a little 
metal from the outside rim of each coin. 


MONEY 


27 


They did this to all coins that came into 
their hands. So they piled up a lot of 
extra gold or silver. Today this cannot 



TREE MONEY OF MALACCA 

be done, for the coins are made in such a 
way as to prevent it. Gold and silver 
coins now have raised edges. They also 


28 


CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 


have fine lines, or grooves, on the rim. 
If this rough rim is changed in any way, 
the change can be noticed at once. 

We can feel the grooves on a silver 
coin by running a fingernail around its 
rim. Nickels and pennies do not have 
rough rims, because the metals in them 
are not worth so much. It would not 
pay anyone to scrape their rims. 

But it was not only thieves who cheated 
honest people of part of their money. 
Even the governments did it. Suppose a 
ruler of a country needed money to make 
war or to pay his debts, and he had no 
honest way of getting it. Well, he would 
add some cheap metal to the gold or 
silver that was to be made into coins 
for him. In that way he could make 
many more coins, and pay people with 
them just as if they were entirely of 
precious metal. Most people did not 
know the difference. This was called 
debasing. 

Because of all the dishonest work of 
thieves and governments, after a while 


MONEY 


29 



a person never knew whether he was 
getting good coins or bad ones in ex¬ 
change for his goods. 

To make matters even worse, usually 
in each big city there were different 
coins in use from other parts of the 
world. A man selling at one market 
place would be given coins from a dozen 
different cities and countries in one day. 
He might not even know the value of 
some of these coins. 

So money-changers began to appear. 
They exchanged one kind of coin for 
another, or gave out coins for gold bars 






30 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

or dust. A person could take money to 
them and they would measure it to see 
whether it weighed what it should. A 
few hundred years ago, every busy street 
corner or market had at least one money¬ 
changer. Beside farmers and mer¬ 
chants they stood, with their wooden 
benches and their scales for weighing, 
shouting out their business, sometimes 
throwing down a coin on the street to 
tell by its sound whether it was good or 
debased money. 

The money-changers charged only a 
small sum for their services. But they 
cheated a great deal. They did not al¬ 
ways give true weight in coins for the 
precious metal they got. Many of them 
made their own coins, and used cheap 
metal to debase the money. So few mer¬ 
chants could trust their own eyes about 
coins, and few would trust the money¬ 
changers. 

And then men began to set up banks. 
Those first banks were not planned to 
keep money for people. Their main 


MONEY 


31 




R 


CHINESE DRESS MONEY 

business was to find out which coins 
were good and which were bad. A busi¬ 
ness man knew that if he went to a bank 
he would get fair exchange for his coins 
or metal. The banks also coined money 
themselves, and their coins could be 
trusted more than government coins. 
That is no longer true, of course. Banks 
do not coin money now. And all govern¬ 
ments work hard to see that only good 
coins are in use. 







32 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 
PAPER MONEY 

Good money was a big help to trade. 
As people found trading easier, they 
traded more and more with each other 
and with different lands. So business 
grew larger and larger. Huge sums of 
money changed hands in selling. Often 
it was necessary to carry large amounts 
of money for long distances. 

Now it was costly as well as trouble¬ 
some, to ship a million dollars in gold. 
For gold is very heavy. And there was 
always danger of robbery or shipwreck. 
So men found an even simpler way of 
trading. They used paper notes in place 
of metal. 

It may seem strange that people are 
willing to accept a piece of paper in 
place of gold or silver. But this piece 
of paper is a very special thing. It is 
put out by a government. This govern¬ 
ment has said that it may be used to 
pay taxes. And since it can be used 
even for that, it can be used in any case 
where real money is used. 


MONEY 


33 


All of us know something about how 
a piece of paper can be used to get goods. 
Sometimes when a mother sends her boy 
to the corner store, she writes a note on 
a slip of paper, saying: "Dear Mr. Store¬ 
keeper, please give Billy two dozen eggs 



CHINESE CASH 


and a pound of butter. I’ll pay you 
Saturday.” The storekeeper trusts the 
mother’s word, because he knows she is 
honest. He knows she will pay him 
just as she promised. So for the time 
being, her note is being used just like 
money. 


34 


CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 


The use of paper money began much in 
this way. Suppose a man in one city 
bought a large amount of goods in an¬ 
other city. Instead of shipping gold to 
the other city in payment, the buyer 
placed it in a bank. The bank gave him 
a note saying that the gold was now 
in its hands, and would be returned at 
any time to the holder of the note. Now 
that bank note was as good as gold, be¬ 
cause it could be exchanged for gold. 
So the buyer sent it to the seller in 
payment. 

The seller in turn might give the bank 
note to someone else in payment for 
goods he bought. Whoever had the note 
knew he could always get the gold for it 
from the bank when he wanted it. More 
and more, notes of this sort were used by 
businessmen instead of metal money. 

The paper bills we use today serve the 
same purpose as these notes. They take 
the place of metal money. Of course, 
they are no longer put out by all banks. 
In the United States only one bank, 


MONEY 


35 



THIS SHOWS TWO SIDES OF A COIN MADE IN VERMONT IN 1787. 


called the Federal Reserve Bank, is per¬ 
mitted to issue paper money. Most of 
our bills are issued by the Government. 

How much more convenient this paper 
money is than metal money! The Gov¬ 
ernment can make one small hundred- 
dollar bill that is worth as much as one 
hundred heavy silver dollars and is very 
much easier to carry. 

Let’s look at a one-dollar bill. It says: 

"ONE DOLLAR 

In Silver Payable to Bearer on Demand” 

There was a time when all paper bills 
could be exchanged for gold or silver. 
The Government used to set aside enough 




36 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

of each metal to pay out in exchange for 
bills, should people ask for it. 

But the value of the paper bills does 
not really depend on the amount of gold 
and silver in the treasury. It depends 
on the people’s faith in their govern¬ 
ment. As long as the people believe 
that the government is strong enough 
to raise money through taxes and so pay 
its debts, they will accept the paper bills 
just as they would take metal money. 

But when people lose faith in their 
government, the value of the paper 
money drops. This happened in our own 
country during the Revolutionary War. 
The Government printed a bill called 
the Continental. But people were not 
sure that the Government would be able 
to pay its bills. It might lose the War. 
It might not last after the War. People 
did not trust the Government. So they 
did not trust the Government’s money, 
and the Continentals became nearly 
worthless. They were actually used for 
wallpaper. Even to-day when people 


MONEY 


37 


want to say that something is no good, 
they may say it is not worth a Con¬ 
tinental. 

The same thing happened to the Ger¬ 
man paper mark after the first World 
War. Before that War the mark was 
worth almost as much as our silver quar¬ 
ter. After the War the German Gov¬ 
ernment and the German people were 
very poor. They had little gold or silver. 
No one trusted the paper marks. Their 
value became less and less. It took more 
than one million marks to go to the 
movies just for one evening of pleasure. 
And in the United States peddlers on 
street corners used to sell one million 
German marks for a nickel. Some 
people bought them for fun. Others 
thought the value of the paper marks 
would rise, but that did not happen. 

Germany was not the only country 
whose money was affected by the first 
World War. During the War all coun¬ 
tries stopped making gold coins, and 
some countries printed nothing but pa- 


38 


CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 


per money. Even after the war, gold 
coins never came back into general use, 
though governments kept on making sil¬ 
ver coins. Most countries have only a 
very little gold today. The United States 
has a great deal, though it is not used 
for coins. Some of it is set aside to 
back up the Federal Reserve Bank’s 
notes. But none is set aside for the rest 
of our paper money. The word of our 
Government and its power to collect taxes 
are enough to keep up the value of 
the Government bills. 

COUNTERFEIT PAPER MONEY 

The use of paper money makes coun¬ 
terfeiting much easier. It is harder to 
tell a counterfeit paper bill than to tell 
a counterfeit coin. And the counter¬ 
feiter makes greater profits, too. It does 
not cost so much to counterfeit paper 
money as metal money. 

Of course, people who are used to 
handling paper money a great deal can 
usually tell when a bill is not real. 


MONEY 


39 

But some counterfeit bills are so cleverly 
made that only special tests will show 
that they are not real money. Counter¬ 
feiting is a serious crime, and the gov¬ 
ernment punishes counterfeiters very 
severely. 

MAKING PAPER MONEY 

All of our paper bills — even the Fed¬ 
eral Reserve notes — are printed by the 
United States Bureau of Printing and 
Engraving. 

The paper used for the bills is not 
ordinary paper. It is made in Dalton, 
Massachusetts, by a method which is 
kept secret. Very few people besides 
the Government know how it is made. 
So counterfeiters would have a hard time 
trying to make the same kind of paper. 

The paper is made of linen and cotton, 
with tiny thin, colored silk threads 
pressed into it. If we examine a bill 
carefully, we can see sometimes a num¬ 
ber of tiny red threads, and sometimes 
some blue ones. 


40 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

The design for the bills must also be 
so cleverly done that counterfeiters will 
not be able to make one like it. The 
Government employs men to do nothing 
but cut the designs into steel plates for 
printing. These men are steel en¬ 
gravers. There are very few of them 
in the world today, so the Government 
trains men especially for this important 
task. Some of the engravers cut the 
heads that will appear on the bills. 
Some do the lettering. Some do the 
border design. 

Now the engraved steel plates are put 
into printing presses. The special paper 
is put on the presses, and the money is 
printed much like a newspaper. A num¬ 
ber of bills are printed on one big sheet 
of paper, and then cut apart. They are 
counted and wrapped. Then the money 
is ready to be sent throughout the 
country. 

The Government prints about one bil¬ 
lion bills each year. That is enough 
money to fill fifty railroad cars. 


MONEY 


41 



A LONG TIME AGO THIS LITTLE COINING PRESS WAS USED 
TO STAMP OUT MONEY. 

The paper bills last only about a year. 
Then, torn and tattered, they are brought 
back to the treasury. Every day four 
or five tons of old bills come back. Most 
of them are put into a machine which 
chews them up, a million dollars or more 
at a mouthful. Some of the mass of 
chewed paper is burned. Some of it is 
sent to factories which press it into molds 
for many small articles. 

The paper money of different countries 
is printed on different kinds of paper, 
and in different colors. United States 



42 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

bills are printed in green and black. 
Chinese bills are red, white, yellow, and 
gold. Italian notes are printed on white 
paper with pink, blue, and red. 

A FACTORY FOR MONEY-MAKING 

All of our coins are made by our Gov¬ 
ernment in buildings called mints. 
These mints also make coins for many 
small countries that do not have their 
own mints. The United States has a 
mint in Philadelphia, one in Denver, 
and one in San Francisco. 

The mint in Philadelphia is the larg¬ 
est of the three. It covers one city block. 
No American can look up the broad flight 
of stairs at the front entrance without 
feeling proud. There at the top, be¬ 
hind the great gates made of heavy iron 
bars, a guard is walking back and forth, 
his gun at his hip. Behind him there 
are other iron doors, and more guards. 
Day and night there are guards watch¬ 
ing over this great money-making 
factory. 


MONEY 


43 


The first room to visit is the museum 
where there are many strange coins from 
different countries and from different 
times in history. Next is the place 
where the dies, or molds, are made for 
all United States coins. A die is made 
of very hard metal. The design that is 
to appear on one side of a coin is cut 
into this metal. It takes two dies to 
make a coin, for a coin has a different 
design on each side. 

The die-cutting department also makes 
dies for medals used by our Government 
and some other governments. Anyone 
who wants a medal made can pay the 
United States Mint to make it for him. 

Before any metal is ready to be 
stamped by the dies, a number of things 
are done to it. Suppose silver coins are 
to be made. When the silver first comes 
to the mint in bars, just enough copper 
has already been added to make it hard 
enough to wear well. First the bars 
are heated until they melt. Then the 
flowing silver is poured into molds. 


44 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

When it is lifted from the molds, it is in 
the form of ingots. These ingots are 
smaller than the bars, and are easier to 
handle in making the coins. 

The ingots are slipped between rollers 
which work like the wringer on a wash¬ 
ing machine. The rollers press the in¬ 
gots into long thin strips, just as thick 
as a dime, a quarter, or whatever the 
finished silver coin is to be. 

Then the strips are taken to the cutting 
machines. These machines punch out 
round pieces from the strip just as a 
cookie cutter does from rolled dough. 
The round pieces of silver have no design 
yet, and they are called blanks. Each of 
the blanks is weighed to make certain 
that it has exactly the right amount of 
metal. Then it is heated till it is cherry 
red and soft, and dipped into cold water. 
After that, another machine makes a 
raised edge all around the rim of each 
blank. And at last the blanks are ready 
for coining. 

In the coining room, each blank is 



THE CUTTING MACHINE PUNCHES OUT BLANKS AS A COOKIE 
CUTTER CUTS ROUND PIECES FROM DOUGH. 




46 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

dropped through a tube into the coining 
press. A piece of metal fits around the 
blank like a collar and holds it firmly be¬ 
tween two dies. On one die is the design 
for the head of the coin. On the other 
is the design for the tail. As the dies 
come together with great force, the 
proper design is stamped on each side 
of the blank. 

At the moment when the dies come 
together, a rough edge is forced on the 
silver coin so that no one can file or 
scrape part of the metal from it, or make 
a counterfeit coin just like it. This is 
called milling. 

Every minute about 100 finished coins 
fall with a pleasant jingle from the ma¬ 
chine into a pan. They are examined to 
see that each is perfect. Then into big 
bags they go to be stored until they are 
sent through the country. 

The bags of coins must be kept some 
place where they will be safe from fire 
or thieves. So special great steel safes 
or vaults, like big rooms, have been 


MONEY 


47 


built for them. The vaults are big 
enough to hold more than a million 
silver dollars. It took more than three 
million pounds of hard steel to build 
them! No one has to worry about the 
money bags locked in there! 

When coins become so worn that it is 
hard to see the design on them, back 
they go to the mint to be melted down 
and made into new coins. 

MONEY MAGIC 

Money is a useful thing to have and 
can bring very much pleasure. So it is 
not surprising that even a small piece of 
money has become a sign of good luck. 

In some countries people say that if a 
bride asks her husband for a penny on 
her wedding night, she will never be 
poor. In other countries they place a 
coin on the head of a new husband to 
bring him luck in his marriage. Even 
in America today some people carry lucky 
pennies in their pockets so that more 
money will come their way. 


48 CHILDREN’S SCIENCE SERIES 

Of course, fewer and fewer people be¬ 
lieve that money has magic. Yet it does 
have power, and it has helped to change 
the world. Before there was an easy 
way to exchange goods, one family, or a 
group of people, had to build its own 
house and barn, raise its own food, tan 
its own leather, spin its own thread, 
weave its own cloth, and make its own 
clothes. 

Today one man grows wheat. An¬ 
other raises cattle. Another makes 
shoes or socks. Others make clothes in 
factories. Each one has his special work. 
But all share the products of the others, 
because with money they can buy and 
sell. So money works a kind of magic 
after all. 





































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